


between the desire and the spasm

by sharkfights (feartown)



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Spoilers for everything, also DELPHINE! CORMIER!, i am so so horrifically in love with delphine cormier that it is incapacitating me, i mean maybe not but i'll be safe and say everything bc i can't keep track of the references i make, i would start a war for delphine cormier she is my helen of troy, more awkwardly-conducted speculation about this week's episode five minutes before it airs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-01-27 20:43:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1721945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feartown/pseuds/sharkfights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cosima kisses her, because here is the truth she needs; the stormy gospel spreading surely, steadily between them. It’s all in the shape of Delphine’s mouth, in the press of her tongue and the whine she can feel creeping up the back of her throat. Delphine can’t lie when she kisses Cosima.</p>
            </blockquote>





	between the desire and the spasm

**Author's Note:**

> So there's a part of me that's a huge nerd for Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus/that whole essay collection, the same part of me that remembers the giddiness of high school Classics and reading The Odyssey and memorizing a truly stupid number of Greek vases, and Orphan Black has been reminding me of that part of myself more and more every week. Uh, that is to say, there are allusions in this to Camus' work, to the scraps of mythology I remember, and I hope they don't come across as grossly pretentious??? Really I actually hope nothing is pretentious, I feel like I am now constantly struggling with prose and trying not to stray too purple or too sparse, and not get wrapped up in description but also not feel like I'm swinging into script-dialogue, and everything kinda becomes a bit of an unwieldy mess in the process. I'm not sure what I'm managing to achieve anymore. ANYWAY, whatever. You're not here to listen to me have a small writing crisis you're here to read fanfiction so absolutely do that.
> 
>  
> 
> PS. Title is from T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men; a person I am also - you guessed it - a huge nerd for.

* * *

 

 

i.

 

It’s been three days.

 

Cosima rolls a joint surely between her fingers, twists off the end. Her game is off, she notes idly, holding it up in front of her.

Across the room at his easel, Felix has been dividing his time between painting and shooting Cosima furtive glances as though she doesn’t notice. It’s super irritating, but she can’t bring herself to tell him to knock it off, can’t bring herself to do anything but light her joint, lie back against the pillows and watch the smoke rise lazily from her mouth into the atmosphere.

Her body aches, but it’s soothed by the burn of weed, the familiar action of guiding smoke through her lips and out.

Three days since she deserted the DYAD. Three days since she walked in on the discussion of her inevitable demise, since she learned the stem cells from the baby teeth hadn’t worked. Three days since Delphine had betrayed her. _Again_.

She’d heard raised voices on her way down to the lab, the broken English that Delphine slips into when she speaks too quickly and too passionately, and then Leekie. It was weird for him to visit them unannounced – or truthfully at all; their lab that was once someone’s discarded carcass had started to feel like a bright and humming sanctuary – barely part of the DYAD at all. Easy to forget they were always being watched, always being _monitored_.

Something made her stop before the door; maybe it was her name or _blood_ , _sickness_ , _death_. They’re buzzwords to her now, buzzwords that trigger tender sense memories: red slipping through her fingertips, the wet rasp of air against the inside of her throat. She’d heard everything Leekie said afterward very clearly.

“It could mean integral pieces of the puzzle fit together again, Delphine. We have new information with Cosima that we didn’t have with the others. We’ve got its _conception_.”

“And when she finds out? What then? What do you suggest we do?”

“She’s your subject, Delphine. You requested unequivocal ownership.”

“ _Owner_ ship—”

Cosima had swiped in then, stood in the doorway and watched the colour drain from Delphine’s face.

 

(Here is what Cosima doesn’t know: Delphine had fought, Delphine was furious, Delphine had wanted to stick a knife in the heart of the DYAD and twist until it bled.

Delphine has not betrayed her. Delphine would set the world ablaze and let it crumble to dust in her fists before she would betray Cosima again.)

 

Cosima hadn’t let either of them explain. She’d walked past them, taken her laptop and fled the building. Delphine hadn’t followed, so Cosima had taken it as an admission of guilt.

Though, truthfully, Cosima's not sure she would have listened to her if she had. As she gets sicker Cosima feels a ticking clock behind her eyelids, and as it ticks faster and faster she is less inclined to listen, so much less inclined to sit down, _slow_ down, too possessed by skittish, shaky energy. It rattles beneath her skin, quakes through her blood in time with her slipping heartbeats. It’s hard to hear reason when it feels like your body is warring within itself.

 

In the deep red nest of Felix's bed, she listens to the city breathe against the windows, listens to the slashes of Felix’s brush against canvas, pulls smoke into her throat and lets it burn.

Delphine the spy, Delphine the martyr. Delphine the liar.

Delphine, heady like woodsmoke, warm like burnt gold, who had become such a fixed presence looming at her back, near her hip; a solid, wanting shape filled with fire. Delphine was supposed to be her knight, or her squire, whatever medieval counterpart made sense; the one who would take over for her in battle should something happen.

Really, she should have seen it coming. She shouldn’t have trusted any of it, not Delphine, not the DYAD’s offer, not Leekie’s purportedly selfless actions with the stem cells they found. Trust, as usual, had screwed her good and proper. It's time, she thinks, to take matters into her own hands. She needs to be the one in charge of her biology.

“Felix,” she says, the letters sticking to her teeth, and somewhere beneath the smoke she knows she should probably put the joint down, that she feels not unlike Alice in Wonderland’s caterpillar with his bendy, wraparound body and excess of misbehaving limbs.

“Oh, so you _can_ speak,” Felix says dryly, and puts his brush down. He climbs the stairs to the bed, plucks the joint from between Cosima’s fingers and takes a drag.

“Felix,” she says again – sticky words, sticky teeth – and puts her hands on his bony knees.

He looks at her, hollows hazy with smoke.

“I have to go back to the DYAD.”

“I’m sorry, what?” he says, completely incredulous in his uniquely dramatic way. “Have you lost your _mind_?”

“I need my things. My work.”

“You’re high.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s totally irrelevant.”

She knows she’s not Sarah, she hasn’t got the skills of her punk-hustler identical, or even Alison’s leery suburban mania. She can’t disguise herself, not even to the extent Delphine can, but she knows she has to go back.

 

If the DYAD doesn’t want to help her, Cosima will cure herself. She will steal the secrets held by these cold, far-reaching gods.

 

 

 

When she sobers up she rummages through some of the clothes Sarah left behind, thanks her clone-sister for having an incredibly monochromatic wardrobe – really, she could use a _little_ colour sometimes – and ignores Felix’s upset kitchen noises as she steps into the bathroom.

He gets a fright when she comes back out, and for a moment she’s honestly really sorry – Felix more than anyone has had to deal with the mind-bending reality of Sarah-as-Cosima-as-Alison-as-Beth and everyone in between, she’s a little surprised he’s still functioning relatively normally.

“You’ve _got_ to stop doing this, you know. Just when I get you all sorted out you go and pull shit like this. Frankly, it’s unnatural.”

Cosima finds her glasses, shoves them back on her nose. “Better?”

“ _No_!”

She can’t help but grin. “You sure you don’t wanna come? Espionage, stealing valuable documents…? It’s a good look for you.”

“Ha, as much as I’d like to go very _National Treasure_ with you, I really don’t want to run the risk of having to watch some kind of traumatic bisexual showdown if we run into Delphine. I’ll stay here.”

 

 

 

Cosima pulls her hood up when she walks inside the DYAD, hopes like hell that hiding her hair will make her even a _little_ less conspicuous, and heads for the lab miraculously unimpeded.

She’s pretty surprised her swipe card still works – she assumed when she stormed out they’d wipe her privileges clean to prevent exactly this scenario, but she’s even more surprised to see Delphine sitting at one of the computers.

The couch looks slept-on, and the whole room smells of chamomile tea. She doesn’t know why – the DYAD gave them an apartment and they _were_ living in it; a sterile, fluorescent box that felt more like a lab than their actual lab does. The DYAD loves their whitewashed walls and minimalist architecture. The unnatural. Typical.

Delphine looks up, startled, when she hears the door. “Cosima?”

“I’m just here to get my things,” Cosima says, gritted teeth and hard shoulders, upset that she couldn't be in here alone.

“Cosima, I am sorry,” Delphine tries as she watches Cosima shove a flash drive into her computer. “You didn’t let me explain—”

“What’s there to explain? I get it. You and Leekie are trying to find something new to do with your lab rat. Something novel to play with.”

“That’s not true.”

“How can I believe that? You were discussing my _body_ , Delphine, like I had no opinion on the matter. And I don’t, do I? Not really.”

Delphine opens her mouth to speak, but Cosima doesn’t want to listen to reasons, or excuses, or whatever it is that Delphine wants. She’s tired. She’s so achingly tired down to her sluggish marrow, down in the very smallest slivers of space between skin and muscle, that she just can’t even begin to deal with anymore of Delphine’s well-woven fictions.

“It was a rhetorical question,” she says, and Delphine’s face falls.

It feels perversely _good_ to see the look of hurt on Delphine’s face, like she’s opened up a wound somewhere inside and the blood is beginning to pool. Cosima has always been able to punish with words more easily than fists, and she wants to use them now to make Delphine’s lies calcify on the air. She wants Delphine to hurt in the same raw places Cosima does.

But then unwittingly, absurdly, she thinks of the way Delphine moans under her hands, Delphine’s lion-fierceness, the tenderness she feels in her lips, her fingers, the way she curves around Cosima’s body and traces her parabolas in the dark. _They can’t all be lies_ , a nagging little voice tells her. _Because you_ feel _it_.

“Please, Cosima.”

Delphine’s pleading knots up in her chest, raps against her skull, and it bothers Cosima that she’s not trying to justify anything. She’s garrisoned herself against an onslaught of excuses that aren’t coming, and it makes her _mad_.

“What, you aren’t even going to attempt to tell me this shit with Leekie is ‘for my own good’, or ‘there’s no other way’?”

Delphine, eyes wet, shakes her head. “I’m not going to tell you something that is not true.”

“Well that’s new,” Cosima snarls, wanting to take a chunk out of those words and spit them back out. Wanting Delphine to _fight_ _her_ , to raise her voice and feel that well of emotion quake up her throat. She wants a storm between them; a violent, shuddering mass of sleet and cloud and thunder slamming against the windows and gathering beneath her fingertips.

All Delphine says is _Cosima_ , her name drifting out of her mouth just above a whisper, and Cosima snaps.

She stumbles forward, grabs Delphine rough around the shoulders and kisses her with a blackening fury, wants Delphine to understand the turmoil she feels ravaging her body. Wants her to hear the ratting inside, hear the ticking clock. Maybe Delphine is not a liar this time, maybe she’s just failing to play a double agent with the skill she wants to, but the DYAD has their talons in Cosima and she can feel them drawing blood.

Delphine rises out of her chair, her mouth bruising against Cosima’s. Cosima can taste salt, taste the chamomile in Delphine’s mouth as her tongue slides hotly against Cosima’s own. Delphine doesn’t want to back down, doesn’t know how else to prove she is telling the truth.

Cosima can taste that, too. She kisses hard, kisses with ferocity, kisses until all she can feel is Delphine’s love: choking down her throat, seeping into her pores, crackling along her skin. Delphine kisses and her love spills out; raw, unpolished and broken. It wraps itself around Cosima like smoke, drumming on her chest and snaking between her ribs.

Here is her sleet, here is her cloud and thunder and hail, bellowing between them. Here’s the storm she wanted to feel.

She surges up, clutches at Delphine’s hair and jaw and neck, lets Delphine jerk her hips forward with rough hands, rougher hands than she can ever remember her using. Delphine is a wave with the strength of the ocean behind her, as desperate to wash away the frightened deer-panic stampeding through Cosima’s body as Cosima is to be tangled up in it.

She hikes her dress up somewhere around her waist and finds Delphine’s hand, drags it brusquely between her thighs. She gasps into Delphine’s mouth when she slides her fingers inside her without pretence, gasps when she thrusts up and pushes Cosima back hard against the table.

Delphine tows her lips across Cosima’s jaw, past her ear, buries her head in Cosima’s neck. She crowds in, impossibly close, like she’s certain Cosima will vanish in a sudden hollow shudder of bones and breath. Her fingers are unyielding and her own hips rock against Cosima’s, rock against her thrusting arm and fuel the coiling pressure Cosima feels low in her gut. Delphine is feral against her, _fucking_ her with a hard heart and whispered words against her throat.

Cosima comes in strangled cry, her hands clawing at Delphine’s back, a knee clamped to her hip.

Delphine looks at her, big eyes dark and hooded, then steps back. Cosima breathes.

She’s suddenly overtaken by the flooding sense that she’s not sure where to go from here – Delphine is uncertain and verklempt in front of her, standing among the DYAD’s trinkets, and she feels they’re not unlike penned-up sheep. Fitting, really. Maybe she should just wait for the wolves.

“I’m gonna get outta here,” Cosima says finally, breaking the rangy, dawdling silence.

“You can’t,” Delphine says, but it doesn’t sound like _you can’t leave without me_ , and Cosima feels the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. Something is wrong.

“Why… not?”

“They will not let you out,” Delphine replies, and she sounds wholly terrified. “They plan to keep you here. A hostage.”

Cosima doesn’t know why she didn’t see it coming; why would the DYAD let their only leverage get away? They don’t have Sarah, or Helena, Alison is a law unto herself in rehab; Cosima is the only one who can be used to force their hands. Stupid – she’s so _stupid_ , why has she stopped being able to make the rational decisions she used to be so good at?

Delphine’s hand twitches, like she wants to touch Cosima but is afraid of the barbs she’s sure are hiding under her skin. She sucks in a breath.

“I know a way.”

It’s not phrased as a question but Cosima knows what it means: _I want to help you_. She knows the DYAD better than Cosima, better than they give her credit for. These people are dragons, they breathe a hungry fire and their wings stretch black over the windows to block out the light. And Delphine is not a dragonslayer, her armor is not clanking metal but cotton and skin and fragile bone, but she knows a way out of their grasp.

Cosima can feel Delphine in her mouth, on her fingers, wound up tight inside her gut like a coiled spring; she can feel Delphine’s heart trembling in the space between them, ready to rupture out of her chest. She knows the way out. Whatever has happened, whatever games Delphine has played, she knows the way out and her heart is loud and true. She’s the only option.

Cosima nods. “Okay.”

Delphine allows herself the smallest smile, and then looks around the room. “They will be coming, but we have enough time to get the things we need, I think. They will only stop you if you try to leave by the front door.”

They work quickly, Cosima copies her files to the flash drive, finds her notebooks, stuffs her ugly blanket into her bag. Then Delphine finds her hand and doesn’t let go.

 

 

 

At night, under the eerie stare of hospital-white lights, the halls of the DYAD ring with a strange kind of terror. Cosima can feel it snapping up her spine, biting at her heels as Delphine leads her down a maze of corridors and deeper into the belly of the brick-wall gargoyle that wants to keep her prisoner.

Delphine’s hand is warm and strong and keeps her close. _Nice night for a jogging_ , she wants to say, but the words are too thick in her throat.

She throws looks behind her, heart in her mouth, sure they’re being followed every other second. Delphine doesn’t look once, as though her precision and haste might prove to Cosima that she wants nothing more than to see the back of this wretched place forever.

Finally, they reach a door and Cosima can see nothing but darkness through its window. She doesn’t know if she’s ever been more terrified.

Delphine, near her temple, huffs out a breath Cosima can feel on her skin. At least she’s not alone, she thinks, at least Delphine is standing familiar and alive at her side; two people against a rushing tide.

“It is stairs to the basement,” Delphine says, just above a whisper. “It is mostly storage, never renovated. There is a fire door on the first level that leads to the parking lot.”

“On the _first_ —how many levels are there? Wait, I don’t want to know. I don’t even a little bit want to know what might be down there.”

Delphine squeezes her hand. They are silent for a long moment, air punctuated only by their shallow breathing, and Cosima looks up at Delphine, a little unsure why they haven’t moved.

“I am afraid,” Delphine says, like she’s read her thoughts, and the laugh she lets out is a tiny and heartbreaking scrap of a thing. “I am sorry, Cosima. I am trying very hard to be brave but truthfully I do not know if that fire door will open.”

Cosima hears the fear in her voice, an acute vibration under her tongue that feels like it could manifest in a scream at any moment. It petrifies her, and suddenly Cosima wonders if this is how Sarah feels, if Sarah lives with this wild, roiling animal in her stomach every day of her life.

“They will have seen us on the cameras by now,” Delphine continues, apparently unperturbed that Cosima hasn’t answered her. “If we are caught I will not see you again.”

She doesn’t look at Cosima when she says it, and Cosima gets the feeling it’s as much a death sentence for Delphine as it is for her. There is a tear in the corner of Delphine’s eye, and when Cosima sees it something inside her feels shredded, the last bastion of her anger torn up and devoured. If they’re caught, Delphine is toast. If they’re caught, Delphine will perish.

With her free hand she finds Delphine’s neck, pulls her head down to her lips and kisses her with everything she has. Delphine, quaking, sobs into her mouth, a broken creature-noise that echoes off the walls. Delphine, lion-heart, lion-fierce, allows herself a second to be the coward.

Then she steps back, and with bright, fearful eyes, pulls them through the door into the black.

 

They descend the stairs slowly, eyes adjusting to the dark, and Cosima sees glimpses of old equipment stacked against the walls, doors to more rooms, and perhaps most alarmingly, several discarded gurneys, wounded and upended next to an x-ray machine.

They reach the fire door, and Delphine pauses. There are no sounds behind them, above them, or outside the door, and the lock is a simple deadbolt.

“It’s too easy,” Delphine says, only a shadow in Cosima’s vision.

“Does that matter right now?” she asks, her body humming with adrenaline and the feel of Delphine’s hand sweating around her own.

“Yes,” Delphine replies, and slowly undoes the deadbolt.

Cosima’s stomach drops as the high-pitched, shrieking wail of an alarm sounds into the night. Delphine swears. She was right, at least.

Delphine shoves open the door and pulls Cosima up the stairs so fast she almost loses her footing. It’s almost comical that Delphine’s forgotten how much taller she is, that her legs eat up ground where Cosima’s do not; it would be hilarious if not for the pure and absolute terror coursing through her veins.

There is movement at the other end of the parking lot, and Delphine directs them away, weaves them through cars and around the back of the building – through an alley, out to the road and into the light. Her lungs scream for air.

They don’t look back.

 

 

Careening across the street, Cosima heads Delphine towards a bar she remembers passing several times, and she hopes beyond all hope that it’s full.

They hurtle inside, Delphine puffing at her back, and thankfully there are enough people that they can slide through unnoticed, enough that they have somewhere to hide. Cosima finds a booth and Delphine slips in beside her, unwilling to leave their shared bubble of narrow survival.

“You need to get rid of your phone,” she says to Delphine, pulling out the ludicrous green thing Felix gave her and dialling his number.

Delphine rummages through her bag, sets her phone down on the table.

“Felix,” Cosima says. “We’re in trouble.”

He knows what it means, and Cosima tells him where they are. She hangs up, twirls Delphine’s phone under her fingers. “He’s coming to meet us.”

“You planned for this?” Delphine asks.

“Not this exact scenario, obvs, but I knew there was a chance I wasn’t getting out of there without a tail. Thank Sarah, I never would have thought of this stuff without her.”

Cosima takes the battery out of Delphine’s phone, removes the SIM, hands the pieces back to her.

“Throw that in a dumpster first chance we get.”

 

 

Felix arrives in a small panic, worried that the DYAD has sniffed them out – sniffed _Cosima_ out – in the time it took him to get there. He envelopes her in a hug, and Cosima breathes in the warm scent of him, wishes savagely that her clone-sister had more appreciation for the depth of Felix’s selflessness.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asks, hands on her shoulders. “My place is probably safe, you know. Art makes a pretty good bodyguard.”

Cosima shakes her head. “I don’t want to keep piling this shit on you, Felix. The DYAD’s not the same kinda animal we thought we were dealing with up ‘til now. Plus, Sarah said it was okay to stay at that… cabin? Or whatever? So that’s what we’ll do.”

At her inclusion of Delphine, Felix’s eyes flick over the scientist at Cosima’s hip, settled back into her familiar place. “You’re sure?” _You’re sure you can trust her?_

“I have to get out of here, Felix. It might be my only shot.”

Felix, who has seen the bloodstains, who has washed them down the sink and found the towels to clean up the spatter – understands. He loves his sisters, he would walk the span of the earth for them twice over, but he isn’t a scientist and he doesn’t have the deck of cards Delphine does.

He sighs, weighted and dramatic, tugs on one of Cosima’s dreads. “Every time I lose a sister I seem to gain one, too. Who’s turning up next, Alison?”

“Don’t jinx it, you’ll get home and she’ll be like, renovating your kitchen or something,” Cosima says, flashing him a smile, and he rolls his eyes.

“Don’t even _joke_.”

Delphine puts a quiet hand on Cosima’s hip. “We should go,” she says.

 

 

ii.

 

They drive into the dark, another headlong plunge, out of the city and into the woods and the potholed roads that wind through skinny trees. Cosima drives, hands tight around the wheel, and sneaks glances at Delphine, her face lit by the glow of the phone in her hands.

“It is just up here, the turn-off,” she says, and peers out into the black.

They pull up to a rundown cabin, a hulking outline lit only by their headlights. Sarah had said it would be safe, that it was owned by someone called Andrew Cooper and the odds of anyone connecting the dots between them were slim. _So much for clone club_ , Cosima thinks. _More like merry band of fugitives with nowhere to run_.

Cosima shoulders her bag and Delphine follows her with the phone’s flashlight, helps her reach the spare key.

“Obviously Andrew Cooper is a tall man,” Cosima says, trying not to watch the shadowed lines of Delphine’s stomach muscles as she searches blindly above the doorframe.

“Got it,” she says, oddly proud, and unlocks the door.

The inside of the cabin is gloomy, musty with disuse, but it has a roof and electricity and it is so far removed from the DYAD’s gleaming whiteness that Cosima instantly relaxes.

Delphine seems unsettled, unsure of what to do now that they’re not super-charged on adrenaline, and truthfully Cosima doesn’t have a clue either. She feels kinda strung out and fizzing at the edges, and thinks maybe it’s best to say nothing at all.

“I can sleep on the couch, if you want,” Delphine says, when she notices there’s only the one bed.

Something inside Cosima twists. She wants to say yes, she _should_ say yes, the rational part of her knows she should separate herself from Delphine’s presence and let herself process, even for a little while. But the other part of her, the grumpy, bristly-tired part of her, wants to go back to having Delphine tucked into the hollows of her body and warm against her skin. It’s not hard to guess which part wins out.

“No, Delphine—I… it’s… safer, if you sleep in here with me.”

Delphine’s mouth quirks. “Safer?”

“Totally, totally safer.”

Tentatively, Delphine smiles properly, and nods. “I found some tea in the cupboard, do you want some?”

“Sure.”

 

 

Later, sitting in bed, she watches Delphine flit into the room like an agitated bird, not quite wanting to commit to anything, until she finally pulls off her jeans and finds her way beneath the sheets. She’s careful, so careful, not to touch Cosima or _construe_ , like Cosima will send her away again, take back all the strides they’ve made and cast her out into the dark.

Cosima switches out the light and lets the night swallow everything, lays back and stares at the ceiling. Delphine clears her throat like she might say something, ask a pressing question, but soon the silence stretches and Cosima finds herself pulled down into the murkiness of sleep.

 

 

When she wakes, Delphine has moulded into the empty space next to her, back pressed up against Cosima’s side and her shoulders hunched away, hibernating against the pillow.

The night before feels like a dream – everything feels like a dream, really, she feels as though she could still be asleep right now, floating along in this strange quiet world of worn sheets and dusty light.

She shifts to look at Delphine, the angles of her bones and the movement of her breath inside her body. She loves Delphine’s hair in the morning: a wild tangle of spun gold that defies gravity, and she finds herself twisting a lock of it around her finger. She drops her hand to the warm plane between Delphine’s shoulder blades, and Delphine stirs.

“Cosima?”

“Nope, guess again,” she snips, and feels a chuckle under her hand.

She kisses Delphine’s shoulder over her t-shirt, impossibly drawn to the line of her neck, the jut of her spine. Delphine hums softly, not sure what the game is here. Cosima shifts a leg over one of Delphine’s, rises up over her back and leans down, smiles at Delphine’s intake of breath. She’s overtaken by the need to catalogue, to remember Delphine’s body and the way it bends, slopes, writhes, and sets her hands travelling over planes of skin, pulls Delphine’s t-shirt over her head.

Usually, Delphine loves to be in control when they have sex, loves watching the reactions she draws out of Cosima with every stroke of her fingers, but for once Cosima wants to take that control away.

“Stay there,” she whispers, and plants a kiss on her spine. Her hand travels low, skips over the soft indent of Delphine’s hip and onto the back of her thigh, tracing unintelligible patterns. Delphine’s already moving, her pelvis already rocking from anticipation, her legs spreading apart.

“Please, Cosima,” she says, the syllables of her name said on little puffs of air.

Cosima runs her hand up over Delphine’s ribs, finds a breast and palms it, her mouth licking wet paths along the back of her shoulder. “'Please’ what?” she replies, revelling in the willingness Delphine has to play along, to let her have this.

Delphine moans into the pillow, turns her head so Cosima can hear. “Touch me.”

Cosima does.

Her name leaves Delphine’s mouth over and over, on a sigh, on a halting breath, her hand bent back into Cosima’s hair. _Cosima_. _Co-si-ma_. Like she’s trying not to forget.

She could survive solely on this, she thinks: Delphine slick around her fingers, her hips roughing into the mattress, her whole body bucking back into Cosima and her mouth hot near her ear.

When she comes she goes still as stone, then soft in a collapse of bones back onto the bed, her lungs heaving under Cosima’s hands. Cosima can never quite believe Delphine is this beautiful; her flushed skin under her fingers, the freckles dusted across her back. Warships are launched onto the white-capped sea over people like Delphine.

She kisses Delphine’s neck again, her hips still grinding faintly against her, looking for release.

Delphine’s hand unwinds from her hair, trails blindly down her neck, her chest, then dips back, rounding over her ass and pulling her tight against her body. Delphine pushes herself up on her free elbow, twists and kisses Cosima’s cheek.

She starts murmuring things in French that Cosima can’t process fast enough to understand, her lips brushing the shell of Cosima’s ear with maddening lightness. Her forehead drops to Delphine’s shoulder, and completely at the mercy of her body’s hunger, she lets her hips rut against Delphine with abandon.

It’s messy and awkward and almost innocent, and Cosima palms her hands over skin, grasps at Delphine’s breasts and hips and neck. She lets her teeth graze and nip, listens to the little bleats of noise Delphine makes, listens to her own gasps as Delphine rolls her hips back into Cosima’s and squeezes her fingers where they’re anchored against her flesh. She finds Delphine’s hand, clumsily directs it to the throbbing pressure she can’t quite relieve, and moans into Delphine’s skin when her fingers slide over her. She rides them until she comes shaking loose, hot and sated, then falls back down beside Delphine to catch her breath.

Delphine kisses her face, a thumb tracing over her jaw.

“I will make breakfast,” she says, and through closed eyes Cosima feels her get up off the bed and leave the room.

 

After she dozes for a while, Cosima wanders into the kitchen and sees Delphine at the stove, setting a pan on an element and then rummaging through the supplies they bought on the road. It’s domestic and it’s odd, but mostly it’s nice. And it is still far, far away from the places they have been.

Cosima hops up to sit on the counter next to Delphine, and Delphine smiles, her cheeks still flushed.

“I don’t even remember the last time I ate,” Cosima says, and her stomach agrees.

“A lot has happened,” Delphine replies, and is clearly still apprehensive about the subject.

“Delphine.”

Cosima finds her hand, guides Delphine between her knees. Delphine’s hands settle on her thighs, tracing patterns in her bare skin with her thumbs. “I’m sorry, Cosima. Leekie, he—”

“It’s okay. Leekie’s not the dude I thought he was, that’s my bad. I just had like, trouble separating you from his motives. I believe that this had nothing to do with you.”

“It didn’t, I promise, I—”

Cosima kisses her, because here is the truth she needs, the stormy gospel spreading surely, steadily between them. It’s all in the shape of Delphine’s mouth, in the press of her tongue and the whine she can feel creeping up the back of her throat. Delphine can’t lie when she kisses Cosima.

She pulls back, rests her forehead against Delphine’s. Delphine squeezes her knees. “It will be okay.”

Neither of them are sure they believe that.

 

After breakfast she powers up her laptop, and is surprised to find a very shaky wireless connection.

“Andrew Cooper’s a cool guy,” she tells the general direction of Delphine, blindly searching for the baggie of weed hidden in the depths of her laptop bag.

“He could use some better dishes,” Delphine replies, and Cosima grins at the frown she can hear in her voice. Delphine grew up in neatness and light, Cosima is sure, all bright sunny colours, balconies with flowerpots and thin curtains shifting in the breeze. Mismatched dishes were probably the height of unacceptable.

Conversely, Cosima grew up in an old manor house – high ceilings and peeling, patterned wallpaper. Her parents, too busy with their science, never bothered to get anything fixed, so Cosima grew up surrounded by the comfort of things never quite working as they were supposed to. The feeling stuck to her skin, and now those kinds of places feel like home. Places like Andrew Cooper’s cabin feel like home.

She stretches out on the floor, crosses her ankles behind her, and begins to work.

 

 

iii.

 

It’s colder in the woods, away from the rumbles and palpitations of the city. Delphine finds a chest of clothes too big for the both of them – though of course, they wear them anyway. Cosima pulls on a shirt, a jumper, her arms lost in layers of plaid and prickly brown wool, and Delphine lays on her back and laughs.

“ _Tu est ridicule_ , Cosima.”

“Yeah, but at least I’m not gonna legit freeze my tits off.” She shifts her glasses up her nose and gestures a hand toward Delphine. “You, well. Whatever.”

“Whatever,” Delphine mimics, in a terrible imitation of Cosima’s voice – too guttural and low, like scratches in the dirt – and finds her own plaid to swim in. It’s absurd, their divorce of worlds, trying to slip into this rustic, simple skin after the shiny press of technology, of experiments and biology and stakes racing high. Cosima leans into it, though, readily allows it subdue the sickening quake of energy, the nagging rattle. Her ticking clock.

 

 

Scott texts her in a panic one day, not long after they settle in, and she calls him to assure him they’re not dead (yet). He’s heard rumours, noises in the building that can only mean one thing: they are sought. Cosima is getting used to living with a price on her head, though, and she promises Scott that it will be fine. It’s an empty promise, pitted, because she doesn’t _know_ anything for sure, but Scott doesn’t need to be privy to that.

“We’re okay, Scott. The DYAD are like a million years from where we are. You’re not calling from there, are you?”

The contempt in Scott’s voice is priceless. Poor, sweet Scott. “No, Cosima, I’m not an idiot. This is a _burner_.”

Cosima grins, glad he can’t see. “Okay, okay, just checking. Gotta be careful when you’re a fugitive.”

When he hangs up, finally placated, she shakes her head. “So _cute_ ,” she murmurs under her breath, and considers saying it louder so Delphine can hear, just so she can watch the adorable flicker of jealousy flare between her brows. _Cheeky_ , she can hear in her lilting French accent.

 

 

 

iv.

 

Delphine wants to swim in the lake.

“You’re not serious.”

“Of course I am,” she replies, and wriggles out of her shirt, dropping it on the porch next to her pants.

“It’s freezing. My hands are literally freezing and I haven’t even left the doorway. You’re crazy.”

Delphine shrugs, looks out into the gathering dark. “Perhaps.”

Cosima watches her stroll out to the pier – so bright against the grey dusk – and dive gracefully into the water. She’s envious, wishes she could indulge her dumb, reckless whims – but she knows Delphine wouldn’t stand for it. Everything she does has to be weighed against whether or not it might make her sicker, whether it will aggravate her aching lungs or add to the pallid sheen washing through her skin. As it is she feels bird-frail in her bones, like they might snap in a strong gust of wind and rend her into pieces. Like her layers of epidermis are as thin as pear skin, so thin they could be easily scraped back to reveal the flesh beneath.

She huddles further into her woollen shroud and walks out to the pier to watch Delphine glide around near her feet. She could be a siren, with all her pastel beauty and enticing foreign word-song, ready to lure Cosima to a watery death, sink her ship to the bottom of the sea. Cosima would let her, probably.

“It looks dirty,” she comments serenely; grins as Delphine rolls her eyes. “I don’t know if I can handle you in bed after this.”

Delphine hums to herself, disappears under the water before surfacing to pull herself out. She advances on Cosima, a dripping water-spirit in the misty twilight, pale and filmy where Cosima is dark and bundled up in layers. “I guess then I will have to take my kisses somewhere else.”

“Kisses?” Cosima asks, and braces herself as Delphine places her freezing wet hands on her cheeks, slants her mouth over Cosima’s and licks in, flowing over her like liquid light.

Cosima grimaces and pulls back an inch. “Your _tongue_ is cold.”

“Oui. I did it on purpose.”

She can feel the dampness from Delphine’s saturated bra seeping through her clothes, feels the cold beginning to cling. It makes her feel weirdly alive. She scrunches up her nose, pretends to be put off. “Gross.”

 

 

After Delphine showers, after Cosima changes clothes, Delphine climbs on the bed behind where Cosima is working with her laptop, folds into her back and rests her head on her shoulder.

“I washed away the swamp monster for you.”

“Good. I like to think I’m a pretty accepting person, but I think sleeping with a swamp monster was maybe going to toe the line.”

Delphine giggles tiredly into her jumper, and Cosima wishes desperately for the moment to stretch and bend into infinity – just her and Delphine, no clones or DYAD or genetic sequences that have started to blur in front of her eyes; just her and Delphine here in the quiet, in the dark, in the sighing woods. At least she thinks she’s fairly capable of handling real wolves, the metaphorical ones that scratch at the edges of her eyes are the ones she wishes to escape.

 

 

They slip into a new routine of work and sex and learning the heartbeat of the wilderness, so different from the glittery loudness of the city somewhere in the distance.

At night, Delphine smokes her cigarettes on the porch – very French – and comes to bed tasting of smoke and moonlight.

 

 

Cosima Skypes with Scott when he can find hidden time, when he can be fairly certain no one is listening, and they try to piece things together across a thready internet connection. Delphine sets up a private box in the nearest town, and Scott does his best to smuggle them samples through the post when he can. It’s messy, and most of all it’s discouraging. There is nothing else to it, they’re starting to find dead ends.

So it goes that she spends less time looking for a cure, more time thinking of the weight of boulders, of her assumption that she could outsmart the DYAD with only her body as a weapon. She and Delphine can draw all the blood they like, line up the vials in little soldier rows until she’s bone-dry, but somewhere inside her a belligerent thought has formed: they will not find the answers they want unless she is back under the microscope and behind the DYAD’s prison walls.

Stealing from the gods always has consequences.

 

 

Soon, there is no question about it: Cosima is getting sicker. She feels tired, can’t make her brain process things with the rapidfire-quickness she’s so used to. Her coughing fits are contractions closing in on each other, and the circles under her eyes don’t disappear after a long night’s sleep.

She can feel Delphine’s worry sidling around her edges, knows Delphine wants her to abandon Scott and find treatment elsewhere, not put all her faith in only a small flicker of hope. Delphine doesn’t think it’s safe having contact with anyone from the DYAD, she is afraid of the reach of their arm, afraid of their technology and the lengths they will go to. It’s almost funny, Cosima thinks, that Delphine used to be so immersed in their propaganda and is now so adamantly against it.

 

 

 v.

 

One day, she answers Scott’s Skype call and her heart stops when she sees Rachel Duncan’s perfectly sinister face. It’s odd that she has never been able to see herself in Rachel, not like the glimmers she’s found in Sarah or Alison or Beth; Rachel is so mechanical and cold, so advanced from lowly human-beasts that if you cut her open, Cosima wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t bleed.

“Cosima,” she says, crystalline and automated, and she feels Delphine tense up under her calves. She flashes her a look, and Cosima shakes her head without taking her eyes off the screen, hopes that Delphine understands what it means.

“Rachel,” she says, and tries to sound as _pleasantly_ surprised as possible.

“You’ve been giving us quite the hunt.”

The way Rachel says the word _hunt_ makes her think of a fox chased by hounds, the thundering hoofbeats of horses and the whoops of men echoing across fields. Her heart thumps behind her ribs.

“Yeah, well, when I go off the grid I kinda like to do it properly.”

Even through a screen, even miles away from Rachel’s physical presence, Cosima can feel her ice-snap posture shifting from polite to menacing. She’s not kidding around. Rachel Duncan, powerful and iron-willed, does not waste time. “Cosima, this game is over. We have your friend; we have the cure you seek. Eventually, no matter where you run, we will find you. But listen to me very carefully: I am willing to make a deal. Come back, sign a simple contract, _stay_ under the DYAD’s care, and we will forget this… mishap.”

She says nothing of Delphine, and Cosima wills herself not to look at the other scientist, whose hand is hot around her ankle, her eyes wide with fear.

“You say you _have_ a cure,” Cosima says, “Not that you _might_ have one. You’ve actually found it?”

Rachel laughs a brittle laugh at Cosima’s disbelief. “You think Scott’s little smuggling spree went unnoticed,” she says, and it’s not a question. “You think you’ve been _clever_ in your deceit. You think, maybe, you have breached the walls unscathed, that you have the same information we do. You do not, Miss Niehaus. You’ve seen what we’ve allowed you to see.”

_Do not play cards against the gods, Cosima._

She closes her eyes. Delphine’s thighs are warm under her legs. _Stupid_. “And what about Delphine?” she asks.

“Delphine’s betrayal will be forgiven if you agree to our terms. She may return to the project. But know this, Cosima: if Dr Cormier does return, we will not hesitate to use her as leverage. She is expendable to us.”

Cosima can’t help her gaze flicking to Delphine, shock-still like a rabbit, and she doesn’t notice the almost imperceptible smile cross Rachel’s face.

“Miss Niehaus,” Rachel says sharply, bringing her back. “You have twenty-four hours.”

Then she disconnects.

They sit in silence for a moment, then Delphine runs a hand through her hair. “You will be a hostage, just as they wished.”

However, they both know without the DYAD, she might as well be dead. She is, once again, being forced to choose between a bad choice and worse one, forced by her own stupidity.

“You’re not coming with me,” Cosima says, shutting her laptop and sitting up.

“What? Of course I am.”

“No _way_ , Delphine. You might be expendable to Rachel and the DYAD, but you’re not expendable to me.”

“And what am I to do, Cosima? Stay here and become a hermit? Live alone in the woods?”

“You could stay with Felix.”

Delphine huffs out a joyless laugh. “Felix thinks I am a spy and a traitor.”

She’s right, of course. Cosima is the host-cell, she is the sun Delphine orbits, and without her Delphine is without mooring, without an anchor, without a purpose. She looks Cosima square in the eye, irises greener than Cosima’s ever seen them.

“Even if you tell me not to, I will follow you there.”

Cosima sighs and Delphine bends down, shifts Cosima’s laptop out of the way and curls into her belly. Truthfully, Cosima feels warmer in Delphine’s vehemence. Truthfully, she’s not sure she could weather the DYAD alone anyway. She sifts a hand through Delphine’s hair and closes her eyes against the press of her fingers into her side. Delphine the spy. Delphine the liar. Delphine; the tall, elastic lion-creature who feels like home.

 

 

In the morning they pack their things into the back of the car, replace the key, and watch the house recede behind their car. The DYAD calls, a chilling banshee-howl through the trees, and Cosima’s stomach sits like iron in her gut.

This is the way forward, this is the escape from death row, she keeps telling herself. _Just like, man up and deal with it_.

She looks at Delphine across the car, her expression determined as she drives. She snakes her hand across the divider, threads Delphine’s fingers through her own. They are Cosima-and-Delphine now, she knows, irrevocably. Rachel Duncan can do what she likes with that.

 

 

The DYAD Institute looms. Cosima looks at Delphine. She thinks of Sarah and Alison and tries to remember that this is for them, too. She imagines Rachel above them, watching out the window, queen of ice and steel. Leekie, in the basement, waiting with syringes. The building houses a carnival of horrors, and it seems absurd that her and Delphine are about to step into it of their own accord.

 

(Delphine takes her hand. Delphine feels every fibre in her body scream for her to turn around and flee back to the woods, return to being the hunted fox. Her nerves shiver with her jumping heartbeat. But she knows she will stay no matter what.)

 

The doors are a faceless maw.

“Are you ready?” Delphine asks.

 _No_ , she thinks, and steps forward anyway.

 

 


End file.
